One week from today I leave for my two week trip to Europe. I arrive in Berlin Monday morning, then it's on to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest over the next two weeks.

It's going to be fantastic. As soon as I'm done here, I'm off to B&H Photo to buy me a new digital camera. I'm pretty excited about that on its own.

So here's a list of some of the books I've been reading to get ready for my trip.

I'm midway through these two:

Desire and Delusion--three Viennese novellas by Arthur Schnitzler. The first one was excellent--"Flight into Darkness." It's about a guy who's afraid he's going insane. It's somewhere between Kafka and Nabokov.

Fin-de-siecle Vienna by Carl E. Schorske. This is a really well-written collection of essays about the history of Vienna at the end of the 19th century. It's an amazing place--there's some stuff about Schnitzler--Freud avoided him socially, for instance--along with Klimt and Freud and all the rest. It's going to be cool to visit the birthplace of psychoanalysis.

Another Vienna history and culture book that I started but cast aside:Vienna's Golden Autumn by Hilde Spiel. I might like this one better after reading the other two, but it's not as readable as the other Vienna history. Good pictures, though.

For Berlin, I'm still raving about Isherwood's Berlin Stories. I've been wandering around NY narrating my life in a Christopher Isherwood voice for weeks now.

It was especially good when read in conjunction with Before the Deluge by Otto Friedrich--a history of Berlin from 1918 to 1933. Fucking hell. It's incredible and it was mind-blowing to read about the fighting in the streets in 1919 and follow along on a new cycling map of the city that I'll use next week!

I've shortchanged Prague and Budapest a bit, but I've read loads of Kafka and some Kundera. But a good book on Prague I've only dipped into briefly is just called "Prague" by Richard Burton. It's almost brand new, so it's quite reliable. There's loads of history in Prague since it's the oldest of the cities I'm visiting. I was pretty surprised by that.

And Budapest I've hardly read about at all, but it gets mentioned some in the Vienna books. I have skimmed an essay in this book: The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the cultural history of Vienna and Budapest. by Peter Hanak.That one is pretty dry academic prose about urban planning issues, so I've been put off.